Haskell Brain Teasers is currently in beta. If you’re planning to read it I’d love you to get the beta and give feedback now!

pragprog.com/titles/haske...

More than *anything* the people who actually know how technology works, who actually build things, wish that people would treat LLMs like every other technology, and be normal about them. Don't build a religion about them, don't force them on people, don't ignore the problems. Just be normal.

I think a significant underlying challenge is that one of the biggest unsolved problems in software engineering is getting any two developers to agree on the definition of simple.

That said, you don’t have to write a book to practice it. I think all technical writing can do with a bit of making the reader the hero of their own story. Technical writing provides a lot of opportunity for the reader to overcome obstacles and the author to guide them and celebrate with them.

Something that isn’t new to me, but I struggle with a bit is knowing some of the horrendous history of western Egyptology. I do think it’s okay to appreciate the learning while trying to be respectful recognizing the history, but it’s worth acknowledging.

1. It’s amazing to learn something completely impractical (to me) just for the sheer joy of learning, and I need to do that more.
2. Unicode support has come a long way in Linux these days.
3. I wish I’d studied languages more when I was younger.
4. I’m really, really bad at drawing birds.

Of course there will always be some room for superstition and times when the cost of failure is too high- no e-commerce company is going to push big changes the day before Black Friday.

There’s always some risk of failure and expected value calculations are a normal thing to do.

It really should be, because I think that feeling signals a place where a system really demands more care and investment. Good engineering should have a developed intuition about risks, and turning uncomfortable gut feelings into working software before an outage is the best outcome.

Okay, yeah, I buy this perspective. I’m so accustomed to it that I forget merging and deployment are actually different things.

I was in a few principal engineering roles before moving into management and I can definitely see on this side of it how if/when I move back into an IC role, the experience will have made me vastly more effective.

I like a lot about my job as a manager but it’s the most draining job I’ve ever done.